Sulu adjusted the bedclothes, then set the slate down. He then lifted Trinh’s hand and place it atop the screen. “It that okay?” he asked.
Trinh’s index finger moved. “Yes.” Since she had used her data slate before her injuries to record messages, Sulu had been able to program the device to speak in her normal voice. When Trinh had begun using the slate for the purposes of communication a few days ago, she’d asked him to do that. He’d done so cheerfully, but he actually found the experience mildly unnerving.
Trinh wrote more with her finger. “Earth? My mother seeing me?”
“I want to take you back to Mars,” Sulu told her. Trinh had lived for most of her teenage years in Bradbury Township on the red planet. Her father had since passed away, but her mother still lived there. “Your mother and I want to work together to help you get better.”
“You? On Mars?” said the data slate, and then Trinh added more. “Your career?”
Sulu leaned back in over the bed and looked into Trinh’s dark brown eyes. He wanted her to see his sincerity, and more than that, the depth of his love for her. “I’m going to resign my commission,” he said, trying to keep his tone both light—This really doesn’t matter—and committed—I want to do this. “There will—”
“No.”
“Yes,” Sulu insisted. “This is not something—”
“No.” Trinh tapped successively on the slate’s screen, on the single word she’d drawn virtually, with her fingertip: “No. No. No. No. No.”
Sulu waited. He hadn’t expected such resistance from Trinh. He knew that she had a good relationship with her mother—something Nguyen Thi Yeh’s moving message to him had confirmed—and she couldn’t possibly want to stay in Starbase 25’s infirmary indefinitely. What better place could there be than her mother’s home to spend her recovery, and who better to be there for her than two of the people who loved her most?
When he saw that Trinh would not command the slate to keep repeating No, he said, “Your mother wants to take care of you, wants to help you, and so do I.”
“Career.”
“It’s not important,” Sulu said, and meant it. He’d worked hard to enter Starfleet, and to succeed once he’d made it there, and yes, he’d hoped one day to rise to the position of starship captain, but none of that was more important to him than Trinh. “There will be plenty of things for me to do on Mars,” he went on. “With your mother there—and she says that your sister’s also planning to come out from Luna for some extended visits—I’ll have time enough when you start to improve to maybe pick up a freighter or transport run now and again.”
Trinh peered up at him, but her hand didn’t move.
“I promise you, it’ll be fine,” Sulu said, suddenly uncomfortable with the silence. When Trinh still did not raise her finger to the slate, he said, “I want to do this. I love you.”
Finally, Trinh touched the slate again: “No.”
“Yes,” Sulu said.
Trinh wrote more. “I don’t love you.”
Sulu knew differently, knew it as surely as he knew anything at all, trusted it more than all the proofs he’d worked through as a mathematician. Still, it hurt to hear the words spoken in Trinh’s voice. “You do love me,” he told her. Then, trying to be funny, he said, “Is this your medication talking?”
“It’s me,” Trinh made the slate say. “Go.”
“I know it’s not you,” Sulu said. “I know what we’ve shared, what we have between us.” He pressed the flat of his hand against the left side of his chest, over his heart, even before he knew he meant to do so.
“We have THIS between us.” After the slate had spoke her words for her, Trinh moved her head in a sluggish circle, as though to take in everything in the room, defining for him what she meant by THIS.
“This,” Sulu said, spreading his arms wide, “is not you. You—” He pointed at her. “—are still you.”
“Not anymore.” Then: “Never will be.”
Sulu leaned back in and gently caressed Trinh’s cheek. “You are still you in here,” he said, and he brushed his hand lightly atop her head. “All of this—” He waved his other hand above her diminished body. “—just carried you around.”
Trinh tried to pull her head from beneath Sulu’s touch. He stood back up and withdrew his hand, giving Trinh the space she apparently wanted. She reached to her data slate again.
“Not funny.”
The comment wounded Sulu. “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” he said. “I know who you are, Trinh, and all of that is still here.”
“Not all of me . . . Part is gone . . . The rest will be soon.”
“Trinh, I don’t want to do this because I like you,” Sulu said. “I’m not doing it out of guilt or obligation. I’m not doing it because of anything I’ve said to you, any promises I made. I’m doing it because I love you, not just yesterday, but today and tomorrow.” He leaned in toward her again. “I love you.”
“You won’t.”
“I will.”
“Luke.”
The name startled Sulu. He knew about Trinh’s first husband; she’d spoken of him early in her relationship with Sulu. They’d met at graduate school on Alpha Centauri—he’d also been an archaeologist—and had wed soon after earning their doctorates. Because of their shared vocation, they spent a lot of time together, mostly staying at home on Alpha Centauri, but also traveling farther afield on various digs.
It had been on one such expedition, to Ophiucus III, that Luke had fallen. In a dig on the fringes of New Dakar, an ancient and previously unknown burial chamber had given way beneath him. He plummeted ten meters and survived, but he also struck his head and suffered a traumatic brain injury. He lived for six months in a hospital before slipping into a coma; he died three months after that.
Sulu understood the parallel Trinh wanted to draw. He also knew she was wrong. “Yes, I remember what you told me about Luke,” he said. “It’s not the same thing. You lost him as soon as he endured his head injury. You lost who he was.”
“Doesn’t matter. Loved him, so I stayed.” Sulu wanted to say more, but Trinh kept writing. “At end, I hated him . . . Hated living in hospital . . . Hated putting my life on hold . . . Hated him leaving me . . . Hated myself not being a better person.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Sulu repeated.
“Mostly hated myself because I knew Luke . . . I knew he wouldn’t want me to stop living life to care for his carcass.”
“You are not a carcass,” Sulu said, finally unable to prevent his voice from rising with his frustration. He paused to calm himself before he said more, but then Trinh used her slate again.
“I am.”
“You are injured,” Sulu said. “And you’re the woman I love.”
“I was.”
“You are.”
Trinh pulled her hand away from the slate and held it up, fingers splayed in a halting motion. He waited while she wrote. It took several minutes. “You love me. And I want it to stay that way. When I remember Luke now, I remember him after his fall. I remember interminable days, watching him deteriorate, and being able to do nothing about it.
“Do you think you can make me more comfortable physically? So what? Caregivers can do that. My mother can do that. But if you do that, it will end up hurting me. I don’t want the man I love to live like that. And I don’t want you to remember me like that . . . like THIS!
“We’ve had seven months together. The best seven months of my life. We both know that nothing you do can ever change that; nothing between us will ever be better. Let’s end it there.”
A thousand thoughts seemed to vie for supremacy in Sulu’s mind. Trinh had said so many things and he wanted to refute them all. “You’ll hate me if I take care of you,” he said, picking up one thread of Trinh’s argument, “but you won’t hate your mother?”
Trinh wrote again. “Mother’s known me thirty-seven years . . . It’s different . . . She’ll remember me as baby, as girl, as te
enager . . . But if it’s not different, I’ll go somewhere else . . . Hospice . . . I don’t have much time . . . Have they told you that?”
Although he had promised himself that he would not cry in front of Trinh, that he would always smile and be a source of strength for her, he had not expected to hear her acknowledging her own mortality. He could not stop his tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“Already have . . . Who I was is not just dying . . . Who I was is already dead.”
Trinh looked up from her data slate at him, and for just a moment, he thought he saw an intensity in her eyes. But she was right: it wasn’t there. She wrote one more thing.
“Please, Hikaru . . . let me stay dead.”
She pulled her hand away from her data slate and closed her eyes. For a few minutes, Sulu watched her. Trinh’s chest rose and fell with her raspy breath, but its rate didn’t change, so he didn’t think she’d fallen asleep.
“Do you really want me to go?” he asked her, but he might as well have asked the empty room.
He watched Trinh for another few minutes, trying to memorize her features, the position of her body beneath the bedclothes, the sound of her labored breathing. He didn’t care what she’d said; he wanted to remember everything. He wiped away the tracks of his tears from his face and watched her some more.
Finally, he turned and walked from the room. He stopped just outside the doorway. Nurse Garcia saw him from across the ward and came over to him. “How’s she doing?” he asked, his tone one of genuine concern.
“She’s . . . it’s already been a difficult day,” Sulu said. “You should keep checking on her.”
“Sure, of course,” the nurse said. “I’ll go in right now. It’s good to see you, Lieutenant.”
Garcia headed through the doorway into Trinh’s room, leaving Sulu alone in the compartment. He considered going back inside, trying to convince Trinh, or even just simply ignoring whatever she had to say. But then he heard the data slate speak in her voice one last time.
“Nurse, Lieutenant Sulu is no longer permitted to see me.”
Sulu walked quickly through the ward and out into the corridor. He couldn’t stay in the infirmary. He turned left without thinking about it. He kept walking, but he knew that he didn’t want to stay on Starbase 25.
Up ahead, a series of large, round ports lined the outer bulkhead, looking out into space. As Sulu passed them, he glanced in that direction. Through them, he spied an arc of Dengella II, the planet about which the starbase orbited, and where he and Trinh had once flown a kite together.
Sulu also saw a pair of starships floating in space, and he stopped to gaze out at them. Several umbilical lines tied the U.S.S. Courageous to the starbase, and a hectic cloud of activity surrounded the Miranda-class vessel. Nearby, free of any encumbrances and freshly repaired, Enterprise kept station. Its crew, Sulu knew, prepared to leave the starbase behind and return to their mission before the day ended.
Earlier, Sulu had made the decision that he would not be aboard Enterprise when it departed Starbase 25. He’d intended to resign from Starfleet and begin planning to relocate Trinh to Mars. That can’t happen now, he thought. The woman I love won’t let me care for her.
Sulu supposed that he could force the issue, that he could refuse to stay away from the infirmary, that he could continue to make plans. But he knew Trinh, and he understood that she would not make it easy. If he had to endure such circumstances on his own, Sulu wouldn’t have hesitated, but he feared that compelling Trinh to fight that battle against him would hurt her, and make her recovery all the more difficult. He couldn’t do that to her.
Sulu peered back out into space. He looked at the ship on which he’d served for nearly five years, and where his Starfleet career had begun to flourish. His anger toward Captain Kirk flared, but he tamped it back down, knowing that he should not make his next decision based on emotion.
Except that emotion’s all I have left, Sulu thought. He had love, but no one with whom to share it. Love, but no lover.
Sulu regarded Enterprise. He did not want to go back there. And yet he knew he must.
Sulu turned from the port and headed for the nearest turbolift. He would ride the car to one of Starbase 25’s transporter rooms. Then he would beam over to Enterprise one last time.
Twelve
Kirk sat at the desk in his quarters, staring across the cabin to where his alpha-shift helmsman stood. Sulu had arrived unannounced a few moments earlier and asked to speak with the captain. It marked the first time that Kirk had seen him since the lieutenant’s outburst in the turbolift—an incident the captain had been content to leave in the past, unreported and un-addressed.
Since appearing at the door to Kirk’s cabin, Sulu had conducted himself courteously, if formally. He respectfully declined to take a seat, stating his preference to stand. He indicated that what he wished to discuss would not require much time.
On the day after Trinh had suffered her injuries, Sulu had appealed for emergency leave, submitting his request through Spock. The captain normally would have spoken with an officer asking for time away from his duties, but it seemed eminently clear that the lieutenant wished to avoid interacting with his commanding officer as much as possible. Kirk approved the request, choosing to ignore the obvious fact that Sulu still blamed him for what had happened to Trinh. The captain understood his anger, even felt it justified, although he also knew that there would have to be at least a professional rapprochement when the lieutenant returned to his position.
Kirk presumed that Sulu’s visit related to his emergency leave, and perhaps to a proposed timetable for him to resume his duties, though it also seemed possible that he might instead ask to extend his time away from the ship. The captain had received regular medical reports from Doctor McCoy during the time Trinh had spent in sickbay, and then from Doctor Rellan aboard Starbase 25 once the A-and-A officer had been transferred to the station’s infirmary. According to both McCoy and Rellan, Sulu had devoted virtually all of his waking hours to visiting Trinh, even at those times when she had not been conscious and awake. The doctors unanimously agreed that no hope existed for Trinh to ever fully recover, and so Kirk had no notion of precisely when Sulu would want to come back to Enterprise.
“What can I do for you, Mister Sulu?” the captain said. He took care with his words and tone, wanting neither to antagonize the lieutenant by being forceful with him, nor to encourage further insubordination by treading too lightly. And truly, Kirk empathized with Sulu. He did not blame the man for the antipathy he’d expressed toward him, but the captain had to maintain discipline aboard ship, specifically in the overall service of safeguarding the crew.
“Captain, I’m here because . . .” Sulu’s words, barely started, trailed off. The helmsman looked away, apparently unsure of what he wanted to say—or perhaps how he wanted to say it. Kirk waited. Finally, Sulu peered back over at him and said, “I’m here because I can no longer function effectively as a Starfleet officer aboard this ship.”
“What?” Kirk said, surprised by the declaration. He leaned forward in his chair, his arms poised against the edge of the desk. “I’m afraid I can’t agree with that assessment, Lieutenant.”
“It’s not a question of assessing the matter, Captain,” Sulu said. “It is a statement of fact.”
Kirk shook his head. “I don’t see it, Mister Sulu. You’re a fine officer. You’ve served this ship with distinction. I see no reason to believe that will change.”
Sulu paused and took a deep breath. “I beg your pardon, Captain,” he said, though he did not sound apologetic. “I didn’t say that I wasn’t an effective officer; I said that I could no longer be one aboard this ship.”
“I see,” Kirk said, realizing that the lieutenant’s anger toward him had not abated at all. Sulu seemed to be challenging him, a situation the captain needed to defuse. He pushed back from his desk and stood up, wanting to face the helmsman on an equal footing. �
�That’s not really the case either, is it?” Kirk said. “It’s not that you believe you can’t serve well aboard the Enterprise; it’s that you’ve decided that you no longer wish to serve under my command.”
“This is not a matter of making a decision,” Sulu said. “It simply is what it is.”
“Because of what happened down on the planet?” Kirk said, injecting a sympathetic note into his voice. “Because of what happened to Ensign Trinh?”
Sulu hesitated, then said, “I have no desire to discuss this on the record.”
Kirk believed the lieutenant’s assertion, but he also thought it demonstrated confusion in Sulu’s emotional state. “Why not?” the captain asked. He circled out from behind his desk and stepped in front of Sulu. “If you truly believe I acted irresponsibly, that I unnecessarily endangered members of the Enterprise crew, then why not make a formal report? Why not go to Starfleet Command with it?” Kirk thought he knew the answers to those questions: Sulu would not raise the issue of the captain’s recklessness because he did not genuinely believe the captain had acted that way.
The lieutenant stared at Kirk, but said nothing.
“You don’t have an answer?” the captain said. Then, wanting Sulu to consider his own feelings, and sincerely hoping to learn the truth himself, he asked, “Could it possibly be that I’m just a convenient target for your anger right now?”
“There’s nothing ‘convenient’ about this situation,” Sulu said, his voice dropped to a very low tone. “But I have other matters to concern me besides how Starfleet Command allows you to captain this starship.”
The response disappointed Kirk. He took a few paces away before turning back to the lieutenant. “So why are you here, then?” he asked. “To resign your commission?”
“No,” Sulu said at once. “I want to transfer to another ship.”
“And what reason will you give?” Kirk wanted to know.
“I don’t wish to make my personal reasoning a formal part of my request,” Sulu said. “I believe that there is no requirement that I do so.”
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